/ Floppy disks are facing extinction, but musicians are still pumping out DIY music projects. The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from … Read more
Dandong, a city of more than two million people, sits on the Yalu River, just over the border from North Korea. The Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge links Dandong to the North Korean city of Sinuiju. A second bridge, bombed during the … Read more
Last May, Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest artificial intelligence start-ups, raised $450 million from investors including Google and Salesforce. It was the beginning of an astonishing funding spree. By August, Anthropic had landed $100 million from two Asian telecoms. … Read more
Annals of Music Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments In the record business, Grainge said, “everything’s disruption, disruption, change, change. I’m used to disruption.”Illustration by Seb Agresti; Source photograph by David Livingston / Getty Save this storySave this story … Read more
In August, 2021, when tens of thousands of government officials, interpreters, and Westernized élites fled Afghanistan following the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, they were joined by nearly the entire foreign press corps. The Times evacuated not only its reporters but … Read more
Today’s free newsletter is brought to you by our sponsor, Antimetal. Antimetal makes cloud savings automated, effortless, and risk-free. Inside the Decline of Stack Exchange Stack Exchange is one of the greatest compendia of human knowledge ever produced. Where else … Read more
Super Nintendo SNES controller Nintendo, 1991 & 2019 Nintendo established the blueprint for gamepads in 1985 with the iconic rectangular Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller featuring a directional pad (d-pad) and face buttons for Start, Select, A, and B. In … Read more
Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began. Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running … Read more
Every morning, 67-year Hideyuki Akiyama drives to his store along the rural roads of Okayama in Western Japan. Today is no different. A line of excited customers queuing up before the shutters are open. “Disneyland isn’t our land of dreams, … Read more
Last October, the pioneering life-sciences journal eLife introduced bold changes to its editorial practice — which some researchers applauded as reimagining the purpose of a scientific journal. From 31 January this year, eLife said, it would publish every paper it … Read more